LAW & ORDER: ORGANIZED CRIME Boss on the Botched ‘I Love You’: ‘It Now Lingers in Their Relationship’

As LAW & ORDER: ORGANIZED CRIME‘s Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni) has struggled in the aftermath of his wife, Kathy’s (Isabel Gillies), death, his loved ones have worried about his mindset.

After showcasing signs of PTSD and causing a car wreck, his kids—along with his former partner, Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay)—held a recent intervention to try and get him to admit he needed help. But Elliot balked at the suggestion, insisting he was fine.

“I think that’s the most out of control he’s ever been—and he’s not a man that likes to be out of control,” LAW & ORDER: ORGANIZED CRIME boss Ilene Chaiken notes.

But things spiraled from there. After Olivia asked him what he needed, his answer was simple, “I love you.” After a prolonged silence from Olivia and his children, Elliot seemed to realize what he said and clarified, “I love all of you. I don’t think I can do this.” And while Olivia tried again to reach out, he quickly bolted from his home.

Though the duo worked together in the recent crossover—with Olivia getting closure on her brother’s death, the two having a very near-death situation, and her expressing hope that it looked like he was getting better—Elliot was very clear early on that he didn’t want to talk about what went down in the intervention.

“I think that there’s truth in what he said, but it’s a complicated truth,” Chaiken admits. “He wasn’t speaking explicitly to her. There may have been some very deeply subterranean, subconscious truth to it, but he was talking to his whole family, and to her as a part of his family. And he was grasping for something to hold on to. But I think that the fact that he said it now lingers in their relationship, and will continue to need exploration.”

“In episode 5, the relationship is in a really tenuous place,” she continues. “From the very beginning, they’ve been trying to figure out who they are to one another, who they can be to one another, under these new and extreme circumstances.”

Complicating matters further for the former partners—who expressed their care for each other during their tenure working together, but had never explicitly used the word “love”—is that they do keep working together. (There’s also that mysterious letter, which will come into play later.)

“I don’t think he can ever really put it aside, but he certainly is going to do his best to put it aside when he’s doing police work with her,” Chaiken says. “But it seems to crop up between them. It’s tense. Even when they’re just working together as cops, it’s a new relationship, and a fraught relationship.”

And while Elliot did originally reject the request to get help, he did hear his loved ones. “That’s one of the features of this show: that we really spend time in, particularly, Elliot Stabler’s personal life,” Chaiken says. “And in all of our characters’ lives. And it’s something that Stabler should and will deal with. And we deal with it in the show. Between now and the end of the season, there will be some attention paid to the fact that Stabler’s dealing with PTSD, and it’s not something that you can just wish away.”

LAW & ORDER: ORGANIZED CRIME, Thursdays, 10/9c, NBC

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